When I was in high school I was introduced to a lot of things in music and one of those things was an album called "Master of Puppets" by Metallica. I was almost immediately hooked by the sweet riffs and complexity of the music. I also really enjoyed the somewhat political and also poetic nature of the lyrics, which I probably read while out of the CD sleeve many times while listening to the songs.
I feel as though that album and "Justice for All" are two of the best mainstream metal albums of all time.
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I still find myself going back to those albums on a regular basis and they are a regular part of my Spotify playlist and I am kind of surprised that Metallica has their music on Spotify seeing as how Lars has been so outspoken about music sharing in the past like when he actually spoke in front of Congress during the ill-fated and futile fight against sites like Napster, if you even remember that thing. It accomplished nothing and people just started sharing Metallica's music for free even more than they were doing beforehand.
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If you haven't seen the Southpark episode they were picking on Lars Ulrich by saying that "because of people illegally downloading his music without paying for it, Lars is going to have to wait 2 weeks for his gold plated shark tank bar."
I didn't allow my disdain for Lars to affect my love for their music because I was already a big fan of all their previous 4 albums but something happened to me that I think most early Metallica fans also felt when they actually got "big" in the music industry.
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The "black album" which was actually untitled, was the one that really brought Metallica to the forefront and made them globally very popular and the darlings of MTV. "Enter Sandman" was the first song released and even people that weren't alive when it was released are probably familiar with that song. It seemed as though the entire world loved that song and the album. I hated it.
Most of the old school fans of Metallica felt as though Metallica had betrayed their already existing fans when they decided to seriously step down the intensity of their music and go mainstream and this was something that they continued doing from that point forward. I can understand why they would do it because it was making them significantly more money and drawing much bigger crowds to their shows. I wouldn't say I hated all of their music from that point forward, but I feel as though it pales in comparison to the albums that came before it.
They sold out, that much is for certain but hey! Metallica is a business as well as a band and if given the opportunity to increase my own income 20 times over by changing the way I run my own business, I would do it as well.
Every album that happened since "the Black album" has been a bit disappointing to me and other old school fans because we see it as a toned down and very tame version of what the band was, and is capable of. I've seen them on tour twice and the crowd seemed to agree with my sentiment as they would get a lot more excited about songs being played that were pre-black-album than they were about their newer stuff.
I also don't care for the way that they treated Jason Newsted
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Jason was added to the lineup after Cliff Burton died in a bus crash while on tour. The first full-length album that he did with the band was "And Justice for All" and although I didn't really notice it at the time, the rumors are true that the final edit of the tracks had the bass intentionally turned down to the point where it is almost unnoticeable that a bass player is in the band at all. Newsted claimed that this was because Lars had told the producer to do this, but Lars denied it. It would later be revealed by the album's chief mixer, Steve Thompson, that it WAS in fact because of Lars' insistence that the bass levels be reduced on all tracks.
Jason was always treated like an outsider in the band according to many interviews that he has done and this is a real shame considering that he was there and perhaps a big part of why the band rose to the fame levels that they did. I understand that the original lineup probably would have preferred to have Cliff Burton in the band, but Cliff was dead. There was no reason to treat Jason like that. Jason would later quit / get fired from Metallica in 2000 and this is where things really started to fall apart in my book.
I couldn't really even tell you the name of any of the songs that Metallica released after Newsted left the band and I think it was the very first album they released after his departure that was the last time I ever had anything to do with the band.
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St. Anger is such a terrible album that I actually destroyed it after listening to it a couple of times. Like many people I was really excited because Metallica touted the album as a return to their roots. In my mind that meant that they were going to go back to being a real metal band but instead what we got was a horrible sounding album that felt like they didn't even try to make it good.
Singer James Hetfield admitted in an interview that the writing process was seriously impacted by Jason Newsted's non-involvement with it. Well, that certainly was evident with St. Anger, which I consider to definitely be Metallica's worst album and also just a terrible album in general compared to anyone else as well.
I think fondly of the times that I had listening to old school Metallica while in high school and still love most of the tracks from their first 4 albums. I return to them regularly with a real sense of nostalgia. Almost all the stuff that came after 1990 has been a disappointment to me though.
What do you think?